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In partnership with the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), we brought together human rights activists, journalists, bloggers, lawyers, etc to discuss ICT policy issues in Africa and in the world. A special focus was on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) because we examined the current policies and the way the policy development process is being handled in the DRC.

For two days, it was a good opportunity for journalists and human rights advocates in Goma to be exposed to Internet freedom topics and know how they can be part of the policy discussion. One of the major activities was that participants were able to read the current ICT laws and to compare it with the new proposed ICT laws currently under discussion at the Parliament.

Recommendations were drafted on how the ICT proposal can be improved and have it include issues such as…

I am often torn between sharing such a dangerous tool and just keeping it among the hands of few. But then I think, well, a way to protect yourself and your systems is at least offered here. So, here we go. To use the words of philastokes from APPLEHELPWRITER, “Stay safe, folks!”

Intro
EvilOSX is a malware project hosted on GitHub that offers attackers a highly customisable and extensible attack tool that will work on both past and present versions of macOS. The project can be downloaded by anyone and, should that person choose, be used to compromise the Macs of others.

What particularly interested me about this project was how the customisation afforded to the attacker (i.e., anyone who downloads and builds the project, then deploys it against someone else) makes it difficult for security software like my own DetectX Swift to accurately track it down when it’s installed on a victim’s machine.

In this post we’ll explore EvilOSX’s capabilities, customisations, and detection signatures. We’ll see that our ability to effectively detect EvilOSX will depend very much on the skill of the attacker and the determination of the defender.

For low-skilled attackers, we can predict a reasonably high success rate. However…

In one more of these wonderful scripts that can do crazy things, philastokes from APPLEWRITERHELPER, has handed you the keys to the kingdom. With this simple script, you can find our the last time the passwords for a set number of users was changed on a Mac running OS. And that right from your Terminal.

Sometimes it can be useful to know when the user’s password was last changed. For example, you might want to enforce a policy of having users (or yourself!) change login passwords after a given period. Alternatively, if you or one of your users is experiencing login difficulties, you might want to check that the password […]

#one liner command line to get last password set times for all users on the mac

Since early November, I’ve been seeing reports of High Sierra users being presented with a dialog box from the Firewall asking whether the user wants to accept incoming network connections to rapportd.

This is causing some confusion among troubleshooters as there’s a fairly notorious process with the same name associated with IBM’s (badly-performing) Trusteer software. This latter often causes system slow downs and the general recommendation is to remove it unless you absolutely can’t live without it.

However, the rapportd process responsible for the dialog has nothing to do with IBM’s Trusteer and is, in fact, an Apple daemon introduced in 10.12. According to the man page, Apple’s rapportd is a daemon providing support for the Rapport connectivity framework. Although rapportd is bundled with 10.12, it doesn’t seem to be active as far as I can tell; all the reports I’ve seen about the connection alert pertain…

It is that time of the year again when all over the world, people are celebrating the birth of the Son of God among men. This year, we want to remember the birth of Christ as we celebrate Christmas with the children from Rudi Education, their family, and up to 500 more people from their community. Just for a reminder, the large majority of the people we serve are internally displaced persons living in challenging conditions right outside of Goma, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

We delight in bringing joy to this community that has been affected by war and conflict for the longest of the past 23 years. Many of you have contributed from $1 to hundreds of dollars to make this event possible for the past 6 years.

Please join us again today and let’s bring joy and cheer in Lac Vert together by giving right on this…

If you are a server administrator who does or does not use Active Directory Directory Services, you probably have had this “situation” before: it was still 9AM, the day was barely started when one of the users showed up by your cubicle with a burning torch and other torture devices forming in their mind. They were angry because it had been an hour that they had been trying to login to the server but they keep going from one obstacle to another.

If the password had expired, they probably changed it to something, but then they forgot the new one or entered it wrong a few times because they were still trying to wake up to the day and their caffein intake for the day hadn’t kicked in yet. So, they tried and tried and tried so much that they found themselves locked out of their account. An hour later, they decided to show up to your office and demand–or maybe just–ask for help.

So, you look at them and help them calm down a little bit with a smile and a few kind words while you are trying to figure out what is it that’s happening. Then you remember the life-saving summary from Microsoft TechNet you had gotten familiar with:

Someone who attempts to use more than a few unsuccessful passwords while trying to log on to your system might be a malicious user who is attempting to determine an account password by trial and error. Beginning with Windows Server 2003, Windows domain controllers keep track of logon attempts, and domain controllers can be configured to respond to this type of potential attack by disabling the account for a preset period of time. Account Lockout Policy settings control the threshold for this response and the actions to be taken after the threshold is reached.

The Account Lockout Policy settings can be configured in the following location in the Group Policy Management Console: Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Account Policies\Account Lockout Policy.

The Account Lockout Policy is one of the interesting areas of Windows Policies where a there is no one-size-fits-all formula for all environments. A decent blog entry on TechNet describes a good case study and how they come to the decision for the number of failed attempts before lockout and the duration of the suspension. They also considered exceptions such as: you can attempt up to two different password an not get them to count against your number of failed attempts as long as they were both recent valid passwords.

Alright, with all this back to mind, you were able to go and get a solution allowing the now happy user to log onto their machine and server and let them work.

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